Dickinson just got a little friendlier to those who find themselves on the go.
Enterprise Rent-A-Car opened its first Dickinson location at 531 W. Villard Street on Wednesday. According to a release, the office is the only Enterprise-branded rental car option within a nearly 100-mile radius.
Jason Clarke, vice president and general manager of Enterprise’s regional subsidiary that includes North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana and parts of Nebraska and Minnesota, said the new facility will service the state’s southwest area and has been planned for about two years.
Clarke said the oil boom real estate market was such that it “took a while to find this location” but the final placement is well-suited to the rental offices’ needs.
“We specialize in being the hometown, home city rental car company and this puts us in proximity to a lot of our different accounts, like insurance replacement and dealership replacement-type business,” he said. “But also this gives us great proximity to the (Dickinson Theodore Roosevelt Regional Airport) and gives us the ability to service that at same time.”
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Clarke said Enterprise had many Dickinson-area customers from the oil and gas industry, in addition to the auto dealership and insurance provider markets, who had asked the company to bring in a more local location over the last few years.
The Dickinson office has three staff members with the possibility of adding more in the future.
Clarke said Enterprise typically recruits recent college graduates, which makes the presence of nearby Dickinson State University a potentially “good talent pipeline” to the Villard location and its business group.
Beyond Dickinson, Enterprise also operates in the North Dakota cities of Williston, Bismarck, Fargo, Minot and Grand Forks.
Clarke said the company as a whole has a global fleet of about 1.7 million cars and the number of vehicles at the local store will “vary a lot.”
“This location is one of about 5,600 that Enterprise has coast-to-coast,” Clarke said of the Dickinson store. “We try to be within about 15 miles of 90 percent of the U.S. population and this location is allowing us to continue to do that.”
